India's largest media firms are building, and using AI tools with gusto

'Script GPT has been built by us using OpenAI and 1.3 mn variables, which include character archetypes, plot twists, etc'

The evil Damini traps Radha in a walk-in freezer. Radha struggles over 10 hours in real time and over 30 episodes on air in Pyaar Ka Pehla Naam: Radha Mohan a daily show on Zee TV. What would this scenario do to viewership? That is the question Zee TV’s business head Aparna Bhosle and her team asked ScriptGPT — the company’s proprietary AI (artificial intelligence) assistant to script writing. 

ScriptGPT said the show’s viewership would drop by 36 per cent because one of the main character’s interaction with family would reduce to nothing. Since it was too late to change the whole track (that part of the show), the team played around with additions and deletions of various scenes. The arrival of a mouse in the freezer, one of the suggested additions, might work, said ScriptGPT. It would elevate Radha’s “nurturer” trait to push up ratings. It did, by about 21 per cent. 

“ScriptGPT with generative AI and machine learning helps us understand characters, stories, plots, and twists that our audience seeks. It is the best customer intimacy tool I have seen in a while,” says Bhosle. “Script GPT has been built by us using OpenAI and 1.3 million variables, which include character archetypes, plot twists, etc,” says Nitin Mittal, president, technology and data, Zee Entertainment Enterprises.

That, however, is just on the content side. Strategically “AI’s role is to enhance the performance of the company and delight consumers,” says Mittal. That is the aim with which it is being tested and deployed across functions and businesses in one of India’s largest media companies – the Rs 8,167 crore (FY23 revenue) Zee. This three-year project began in June 2022. 

Google’s YouTube uses AI tools to make editing easier for users who upload videos, and also to keep the site safe from harmful content. Most entertainment firms are using it for script assistance, editing, cleaning videos, and translation, among a host of things. “AI is going to affect every facet of media and entertainment,” says Ali Hussein, CEO, Immerso, a virtual ecosystem in the making by Eros Investments, the company behind Eros Now. It is, after the internet, the most transformative technology to hit humanity. 

Ashish Pherwani, media and entertainment sector leader for EY, reckons that AI could add over Rs 45,000 crore in revenue to the Rs 2 trillion sector over five years. “On the cost side it can speed up content development by creating worlds at a fraction of the cost and on the revenue side it can push up monetisation,” says he. The ability to dub and subtitle in dozens of languages, quickly, means expanding the market for every show, film or piece of music. “That means monetisation opportunities increase. By December this year, dubbing and subtitling in four Indian languages will happen with 98 per cent accuracy,” says he. 

Let us talk to AI 

The creative ecosystem at Zee was not getting constant feedback from viewers. This meant its ability to change lagged by almost one financial quarter. This, in turn, affected ratings and, therefore, advertising revenue. “The idea was to figure out the best, not prescriptive suggestions from within the data ecosystem,” says Mittal. After a series of brainstorming sessions, it was decided to leverage the capabilities of Zee’s Technology and Innovation Centre in Bengaluru. It took about 8-12 months before ScriptGPT took shape. A system that was, so far,   reliant on ratings, consumer panels, and other offline data is now sort of merged into one big tool.

ScriptGPT has so far ingested 42,000 episodes from channels across the Hindi general entertainment landscape. By April 2024, this will go to 100,000. It has also ingested Broadcast Audience Research Council data, brand track data, and almost every piece of content or audience research that happens on Hindi general entertainment. Now “everything the machine says is 90 per cent accurate as we compare the forecast with actual ratings. But it took a long time over multiple iterations,” says Bhosle.

If the first challenge with using generative AI is the copious amount of data it needs to develop its intelligence, the second immediate one is copyright. Zee, for instance, is very careful to use only its own shows for training ScriptGPT. Most large tech firms have a team of lawyers who vet the stuff they feed into the generative AI blackhole. The IP rights (intellectual property) of the data that goes in and that of what comes out are questions that are yet to be answered clearly. 

In September this year, over a dozen writers, including John Grisham, filed a lawsuit against the Microsoft-owned OpenAI. They reckon the company is infringing on their copyrights by using their books to train its ChatGPT chatbot. One of the big issues writers and actors have fought for in the recent strikes in Hollywood is protecting their faces and images from being consumed by AI. “The jurisprudence on IP creation by AI is still evolving… is it owned by the person or the organisation?” says Kaushik Moitra, partner at law firm Bharucha and Partners. 

Eros is working with the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai to generate a movie script with AI. “Eventually we will be able to develop a full-bound script/screenplay,” says Hussein. That is the kind of scenario that worries writers, creators, and many others and is the third challenge -- the fear of job losses. One CTO reckons that AI will help in “upskilling our workforce so that they stay,” Pherwani agrees. “Jobs won’t go as much because the base will be expanding.” There will, however, be some impact at the lower-end jobs, such as data entry operators, reckon experts.

Bhosle says there has been no resistance to the AI project in team Zee TV. She adds, “Working with Script GPT, I see our creatives become more creative by understanding not only what works, but also why it works. This understanding helps us get closer to our audience and tell stories they want to see and hear. Unless we are equipped for the future, how will we face it?”

AI: The rising IQ
 

Renard Jenkins, president SMPTE, a global society of creative and tech people, reckons we are in a hype cycle of artificial intelligence or AI. “It has been with us for some time,” he said at the IBC 2023 in Amsterdam in September. The ability of your TV to find the show you are looking for, of a bot to talk to you about your flight delay, computers and smartphones are all examples of AI or a machine’s ability to perform cognitive functions normally attributed to human beings. Much of this was called business intelligence, data analytics, then machine learning. Also, much of it was predictive and used algorithms. 
 

What has changed in the past decade or so is a newly developed ability to create — to generate images, text, and video based on what it has learnt. This is not simple search-based choosing of pictures; it is deeply contextual and apt generation of content. Generative AI means that media firms can do “customisation to the nth degree. You could have your favourite song sung, say Pasoori (a recent hit) in Kishore Kumar’s voice, subject to copyright compliance,” says Pherwani. AI made the late Mohammed Rafi come alive, briefly, when he sang a song for Shah Rukh Khan’s 2008 movie Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi in a clip floating on social media recently. Rafi’s heirs are sure to go to court on that one, much like Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, many writers and actors have to protect their faces, gestures and images from copyright infringement.